How to draw a virtual line

- Talent stands in front of the camera and pulls a virtual screen from outside of the frame in front of him. I've been resonable successful with this by animating a rectangle following the actors hands. The rectangle is on another track with composite mode set to 'add', so it's a little translucent and looks ok.

- Talent now draws a virtual line graph with his finger and magically the line appears on the screen. I tried animating a line in Motion with the paint stroke tool. It has the right look and feel, but for one thing, the line disappears after a moment, and for another, I wouldn't know how to follow the talents hand. It doesn't need to be super-precise, but the illusion should be reasonably convincing.

- After taking for a while about this graph, the talent would manipulate the line graph by distorting it in a number of simple ways (like stretching it).

You have the Boris calligraphy plugin included with FCP6? That should include Vector Shapes, which provides for color line drawing (great for illustration callouts) which can be animated on, timed to a hand swipe. You can avoid pop-off by providing enough time for the end hold.

You could build a graph line by line, stacking them up as a vertical edit.

Excellent, thanks. Gosh, I should visit here more often. Since I haven't made any progress on this project, this tip is still great to have :-) In fact, I never used the Boris plugin, but now is the time.